


Albiero

by dreamcp



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Space Facts, minor chance of causing an existential crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 22:44:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12118806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamcp/pseuds/dreamcp
Summary: One night, Steve finds Danny on the beach under a beautiful, sparkling sky.





	Albiero

**Author's Note:**

> I'm taking astronomy for my science for my senior year of hs and it's amazing so far, like to the point I'm considering it as a career. There's just so much to the universe, you know? And with how isolated and tiny Hawaii is compared to the mainland, I'd imagine their night sky would be absolutely gorgeous! SO please enjoy some boys enjoying the view together and thinking about their place in the universe. Thanks for reading!

_*Earth orbits around the sun at 18.5 miles per second._

Steve wakes up in the middle of the night to find the other side of the bed empty. He pats the cool sheets a few times, not quite awake enough to function. Where's Danny?

He listens for running water in the bathroom, but it's silent through the house. Steve groans and drags himself out of bed to search for his partner.

Several near-collisions with furniture later, Steve stumbles out onto the lanai. He sees Danny at last, standing on the beach and staring up into the sky.

_*Light from the sun takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach Earth._

Steve steps onto the sand and approaches Danny quietly. They say nothing as Steve stands next to Danny, though Danny extends his hand as a silent invitation. Steve accepts it.

Steve looks up, and god, he’s so lucky to have been raised somewhere that the light pollution was pretty minimal. Danny never got this kind of view in New Jersey.

The entire sky is dotted with thousands and thousands of stars, more and more becoming visible to Steve as his eyes adjust. The Milky Way cuts a stunning path through the sky. Steve's understanding of astronomy is pretty basic, but he remembers hearing somewhere that Earth’s view of the Milky Way is actually a sideways view. Meaning, Steve’s looking through the entirety of the Milky Way galaxy when he sees that cloudy stripe. It's humbling in the most amazing way.

_*The solar system is completely surrounded by a shell of icy debris called the Oort Cloud; no man-made structure has ever crossed this point in space._

“Six years,” Danny’s voice cuts through the silence suddenly, and Steve jumps. “Six years, and this still blows my mind every single time.”

“Beautiful, huh?” Steve asks, tilting his head slightly to look at Danny. It's too dark to see much, but he can see the starlight reflected in Danny’s eyes.

“Yeah. And _terrifying,”_ Danny lets out a huff of laughter. “All those stars? Those are all from our galaxy. Space is so big we can't even see outside of our own galaxy without massive telescopes, and I'm pretty sure we're near the _edge_ of the Milky Way. Plus you figure, there's billions and billions of galaxies in total, and a bunch of those are even bigger than ours, and _they've_ got billions of stars too. We can't even comprehend those numbers, that kind of size. This is just a tiny part of everything, but look how many stars there are.”

_*The closest star aside from the Sun is 4.22 light years away, and it would take over 73,000 years to reach if travelling at ten miles per second._

“Here's the thing,” Danny continues. “I read this article once about something from like... thirty years ago with the Hubble Telescope. These scientists wanted to try pointing it at a totally empty part of space and seeing what was there. This place was _tiny,_ like the size of a grain of sand. You know what they found?”

Steve shakes his head, then remembers that Danny can't see it and says, “Nope.”

Danny finally turns to Steve. “Galaxies. Thousands and thousands of galaxies. Every single tiny dot, tiny light in that photo? Galaxy. It makes you feel so small.”

_*The distance light has to travel is so long that it actually represents how the object looked in the past; right now, a planet five thousand light years away could see Ancient Egypt during its Second Dynasty._

Steve hums. “You gotta show me that, it sounds pretty interesting.”

“Like I said, terrifying,” Danny says before looking back up. Steve watches a soft smile grow on his face. “Still gorgeous, though, I will give it that.”

Steve bumps shoulders with him playfully. “Like you on one of your rants.”

“Like you when you decide to play hero,” retorts Danny. He smacks Steve lightly on the chest when Steve only snorts. Then he rests his head on Steve's shoulder as Steve begins pointing out the constellations he can remember from childhood. 

The stars twinkle in and out. They serve as an anchor, grounding the two men even as they shine from hundreds of trillions of miles away. It's all worth it, if they can keep this view every night.

_*Both Voyager spacecraft carry a copy of the Golden Record. These records serve as a time capsule of Earth, containing both pictures and sounds. Some of these include photos of people, animals, and Earth and its nearby planets, as well as songs from across history, sounds of nature and human activities, and greetings in 55 different languages. Voyagers 1 and 2 will continue to carry these records through space for thousands of years to come, and the best of humanity goes with them._

**Author's Note:**

> Some extra space facts I've learned so far in class because I just can't stop:
> 
> -Albiero (the star the story is named after) is actually a double star, meaning there are two stars so close together they appear as one to our eyes. One is blue, and the other is yellow. Makes sense for these two, huh? ^.^
> 
> -Dark matter is a little complicated. It can't be seen or even _detected,_ but long story short the way that galaxies and other objects in space move just isn't possible based on the laws of physics. So, there has to be some unseen force acting on them to cause them to move in that way.
> 
> -This is where it gets more complicated, but it's the most fascinating fact I've learned yet personally. You've maybe heard that the universe is constantly expanding. Well, it's expanding so much that it's actually bigger than its age: let me try and explain. The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but if it were expanding at the speed of light, it would be about 13.8 billion light years across. But, the universe is much, much bigger than this; therefore, the universe is expanding _faster_ than the speed of light. And, the farther away those objects are, the faster they seem to be expanding. (That explanation was probably terrible I'm sorry, maybe do a little extra digging if it interests you haha)


End file.
